The Mouse Ran Up the Clock
In 2006, when I was working in Singapore, an officer in the local Air Force invited me to dinner. President Bush and Cheney had just invaded Iraq on the pretext that Saddam had instigated 9/11. Cheney had recently been CEO of Halliburton, and maps of Iraq had figured in a secret meeting of oil executives in the vice president’s office. Things were unsettled in the Middle East and there was anxiety about fuel scarcity and cost: fear that “the low hanging fruit” had been picked.
So during dinner in Singapore I argued that the Bush/ Cheney invasion of Iraq was a dishonest imperialistic attempt to capture one of the last top oil reserves in the world using 9/11 as a bold smash-and-grab maneuver unlike, say, the secretive grab of Iranian oil with the installation of Mr Pahlavi as Shah.
The Air Force officer disapproved of my grumbling about the invasion of Iraq. Singapore is a wealthy island the size of a golf course, and very vulnerable. What I didn’t realize was that the officer was looking ahead to China’s hegemonic ambitions in Southeast Asia and the world.
Lo, not two decades later, China has become on economic and authoritarian powerhouse. China has subsumed the Tibetans, Uighurs, and Hong Kong, and global influence through the checkbook diplomacy, including “The Belt and Road” initiative. As the country expands, the reliance on technology for social control is breathtaking—see the previous post, “Measuring Up.”
Now President Trump seems to be confronting China with his tariff wars and lately skirmishes over the Covid flu, 5G, TikTok, and weChat. Supposedly the threat—even all of the juvenile TikTok—is that the company gathers data on naïve Americans which the communist government can command.
The shuddering joke is that American corporations have been gathering big data without limits. The Internet has become a market for big data. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter pretend that truth matters, but their real business is buying and selling big data, which gives pricing power to advertising. Unlike European countries, the US has few laws protecting privacy. Politicians are free to use big data in their propaganda and outright lies.
Measurement is a tool. The computer makes measurement a powerful tool. As population grows, science itself becomes a tool. As the powerful become more anxious about the political imbalance, the appetite for newer and more powerful tools seems inexhaustible. How will it be used? Is the Singapore Air Force right?